How Henry Ford Created the Modern World

Lee Habeeb (00:00:13):
This is Lee Habib and this is our American Stories, the show where America is the star and the American People. To search for the American Stories podcast, go to the iHeartMedia app, to Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Our Next story is about the man whose legacy sits in your garage. Our storyteller is Richard Snow. Snow worked at American Heritage magazine for nearly four decades and was its editor in chief for seventeen years. He's the author of I Invented the Modern Age, The Rise of Henry Ford. Let's take a listen.

Richard Snow (00:00:58):
Henry Ford is among the strangest, in some ways the least appealing of great men. He spent a great deal of the latter part of his life building on some empty acreage in Dearborn, Michigan, a vast museum devoted to American history. Now it's an endlessly fascinating place. Ford collected on the grandest possible scale. He revered Thomas Edison all his life. I don't think he admired any living person more. And he brought Edison's laboratory up from Menlo Park, New Jersey, along with the rooming house that Edison's assistants had lived in and seven car loads of New Jersey dirt, so the buildings could literally sit on their native soil. And when he went came. When he went to get the right Brothers cycle shop, he also brought the pretty little Queen Anne house the brothers had grown up in, and it was a wooden building stood on stone foundation. He had the mortar knocked out between the stones and reed grounds so it would be on its same cement. This tells a good deal about his immense capacity for taking pain. So a whole museum tells a lot about the man. It's like walking through Henry Ford's brain, and that's a very interesting place to be.

Richard Snow (00:02:23):
He loved mechanisms of all kinds.

Richard Snow (00:02:26):
He loved watches, so in the village there are three watchmakers. But there's no attorney's office. There's no nice little country bank, because he thought lawyers and bankers were all leeches. And there's something else about that place, I felt. When Ford was a young man, and all the time he was working to establish himself, he had a magical ability to draw people to him, to trust him, to make them work for him and do it happily. One of his early friends called that the magnet. Asked Henry, he's got the magnet? And I felt a dim tug of that magnet's pull all the time I was in his museum, and that's what made me want to write a book about him. But of course I started the book with considerable trepidation. Probably only Abraham Lincoln has been written more about than Henry Ford, and this wasn't help. When I told a friend what I was going to be writing about, and he said, isn't that story about as well known as the Nativity?

Richard Snow (00:03:35):
That's certainly what I've been worried about.

Richard Snow (00:03:37):
But after I spent a while with him, I began thinking that maybe the story wasn't also well known after all, or actually, rather that it was so well known that we don't even realize it was his story. What I mean is that everybody knows the name, and the comment about history being made that he built a lot of cars, But the true breath of his accomplishment is now so much a part of the world we inhabit, that his influences around us like the air we breathe, and as invisible. Every century or so, our republic has been remade by a new technology. One hundred and seventy years ago it was the railroad, and in our time it's the microprocessor. These technologies do more than change our habits. They change the way we think. Thorreau listening we saw the railroads come in listening to the trains steaming past, Waalden Pond wrote, have not men improved somewhat in punctuality since the railroad was invented? Do they not talk and think faster in the depot than ever they did in the stage office? And of course anyone over the age of twenty younger than that, And it's simply your environment knows what the computer and the internet are doing now. Well in between the steam locomotive and the mac came Henry Ford's model T. And when Ford was quite quite quite elderly, he was speaking with a dearborn high school boy who was doing a article on him for the high school newspaper. And Ford got very sentimental about the one room schoolhouse and square dancing and started to talk about how wonderful these old days were. And the boy wasn't an easy sell on this, and he said, well, that's all very well, mister Ford, but we live in the modern age. Ord said, young man, don't tell me about the modern age. I invented the modern age. Now you'll notice he didn't say I made a hell of a lot of cars. He's said basically, he had fashioned the world he and the boy were living in. And it's a crazy, preposterous, megalomaniac claim, and I've come to think it's very largely true. There is a mystery to him. Certainly his close associates felt so. Almost every one of his high lieutenants. It's interesting reading them one after another. They'd all say, well, we worked on this, and we were very close on that. But I never really understood him. I never understood mister Ford. Nobody called him Henry. The Reverend Samuel Marquis, who spent years working with Ford, wrote, in spite of a long and fairly intimate acquaintance with him, I have not one mental picture of which I can say this is the man as he is, or as I know him. There are in him lights so high and shadows so deep that I cannot get the whole of him in proper focus.

Lee Habeeb (00:06:49):
At the same time, and you're listening to one heck of a story as told by one heck of a storyteller, Richard Snow telling the story of Henry Forward. When we come back, more of the man who invented the Modern Age here on our American Stories. Plead habibe here the host of our American Stories. Every day on this show, we're bringing inspiring stories from across this great country, stories from our big cities and small towns. But we truly can't do the show without you. Our stories are free to listen to, but they're not free to make. If you love what you hear, go to Ouramerican Stories dot com and click the donate button. Give a little, give a lot. Go to Ouramerican Stories dot com and give and we continue with our American Stories and with Richard Snow. He's the author of I Invented the Modern Age. The Rise of Henry Ford. Let's pick up where we last left off.

Richard Snow (00:08:23):
A reporter who met him in nineteen fifteen was harsher about this duality of nature. There's a fascinating little illusory trick which may be played with one of the Ford portraits photographs. If one side of Ford's face is covered, a benign, gently humorous expression dominates.

Richard Snow (00:08:42):
When the other side is.

Richard Snow (00:08:43):
Covered, the look is transformed into one of deadly malevolent calculation. This ambiguous effect is created by Ford's heavy, hollow eyes, the pale eyes one would associate with a visionary or a killer visionarian killer. Ford was full of contradictions right from the very start, well whatever his mysteries. By the time that reporter wrote that nineteen fifteen, a great many people were trying to figure him out. He was on his way to becoming the richest American, and once Theodore Roosevelt died in nineteen nineteen, he was easily the most famous.

Richard Snow (00:09:26):
Now.

Richard Snow (00:09:28):
This man who lived to read about the atomic bombs falling on Japan was born three weeks after the Battle of Gettysburg July eighteen sixty three, on a farm in Dearborn. His father had been born an Irish tenant on an Irish tenant farm, and he always seems to have felt a sort of grateful surprise that he now owned not only a farm of his own, but a prosperous one. Henry fell a little differently. He loved everything about the farm except the farming.

Richard Snow (00:09:58):
He said.

Richard Snow (00:09:59):
My early biest recollection is that, considering the results, there was too much work on the place.

Richard Snow (00:10:05):
That is the way I still feel about farming.

Richard Snow (00:10:09):
There are clouds of folklore about Ford's boyhood, a lot of them sent up by Ford himself, but it does seem clear that he was very early interested in shifting onto machinery burdens that people had borne since biblical times. He said, even when I was very young, I suspected that farm work might somehow be done in a better way. That is what took me into mechanics. Although my mother always said I was a born mechanic. He very early began taking things apart to see how they would work, and he always got them back together. But what he took apart and got back together often ran better. A neighbor said that every clock in the Ford household shuddered when it saw it coming. But he did more harm than good with the clocks, and by the time he was twelve he was repairing neighbors watches. Now the next year, when he was thirteen, his mother died, and he expressed the loss in you know, the best way he knew how. He said, the house was like a watch without a mainspring. And it was perhaps and nearness of her death that made him particularly sensitive to the impact of what he called the most important, biggest event of my early years. His father was driving him into town in his wagon family wagon when they came upon a steam farm engine moving their way. Here's how clearly Ford described it sixty years later. I remember that engine as though I had seen it only yesterday, for it was the first vehicle other than horse drawn that I had ever seen. It was intended primarily for driving threshing machines and sawmills, and was simply a portable engine and boiler mounted on wheels. I had seen plenty of these engines hauled around by horses, but this one had a chain that made a between the engine and the rear wheels. The engineer was very glad to explain the whole affair.

Richard Snow (00:12:05):
He was proud of it.

Richard Snow (00:12:06):
He showed me how the chain was disconnected from the propelling wheel and the belt put on to drive the machinery. He told me that the engine made two hundred revolutions a minute, and that the chain pinion could be shifted to let the wagon stop while the engine was still running. And here Ford, so much of whose early youth is elusive, makes a clear and plausible statement of the moment his life took a course that would change everyone else's. This last he means the engine running in neutral while not driving the wagon is a feature which is incorporated in the modern automobiles. It was not important with steam engines, which are easily stopped and started, but it became very important with the gasoline engine. It was that engine which took me into automotive transportation. Ford followed that farm engine for the rest of his life.

Richard Snow (00:13:01):
My toys were all tools, he wrote. When he was in his sixties, he added, and they still are.

Richard Snow (00:13:08):
But of course, as a teenager he had to learn to use those tools, and he couldn't have found himself in a better place to do that. Detroit had standing timber all around. There was lake shipping, there was iron ore, and the city took advantage of all of this. When Henry Ford turned seventeen and left home to go, there already had one hundred and twenty thousand residents, ten railroads feeding it, and it was home to a thousand different manufacturing businesses, machine shops scattered everywhere. Ford spent a few months in business school there, and that was the only time in his life when his handle writing was legible, But his real education came from the machine shops. He held jobs in several of them and impressed everyone he worked with. He had an almost instinctive sense of machinery. Even at the end of his life, he could look at ten identical arborets laid out on a bench and point to the one that had something wrong with it. Yeah, and he loved being among machines. But a few years later he was back in Dearborn on the farm. He'd been lured there by his father with the promise of forty acres of land and his eighty acres. His father still hoped Henry would become a farmer too. Ford didn't want the farm land, but he went because he did want to be perceived as a more stable citizen. And the reason he cared about that was because he'd fallen in love with an eighteen year old named Clara Bryant. He'd met her at a New Year's Eve dance. He loved dancing all his life, and he married her in eighteen eighty eight, and she turned out to be a great choice. She was steady and staunch and brave, and had such complete faith in him that he took to calling her.

Richard Snow (00:14:48):
The Great Believer.

Richard Snow (00:14:50):
And being married to Henry Cannamin easy for her at first because Over the next ten years, they lived in ten rental houses, and all during that time Ford was experimenting with creating with a machine that would do what the steam traction engine had, which was drive itself. He knew all about steam engines by now and decided there was simply too heavy to power what he had in mind, so he began to look to gasoline and the internal combustion engine. He started building a car in the woodshed behind his rented house. Woodshed makes it sound like too modest to think. It was actually a rather substantial little brick building. You can see it or a replica of it today in the Greenfield village. It was a lonely and frustrating job because everything had to be built from scratch. When Ford needed a carburetor, he had to invent one. He didn't even have a name for it. The word hadn't come into the language. Shed and he worked on his first car for months and felt it was finally ready in June of eighteen ninety six. And it gives a good idea of the intensity of purpose with whichy, the concentration with which he worked that it was only when he was ready to take it out on its trial run that he discovered it was too big to fit through the woodshed door. While he fixed that with an axe and got his car started and coaxed his too cylinder engine into life, and drove off into his future.

Richard Snow (00:16:13):
And hours.

Richard Snow (00:16:21):
The car worked, and he improved it and finally got it running well enough to convince Detroit lumber tycoon to finance what Ford called the.

Richard Snow (00:16:29):
Detroit Automobile Company.

Richard Snow (00:16:32):
And I think it's worth remembering how courageous it was to stake everything on building automobiles in those days. Years later, Ford said a very interesting thing about it. He said, of course, there was no demand for an automobile. There never is for a new product.

Lee Habeeb (00:16:53):
And you've been listening to Richard Snow tell the story of Henry Ford. My toys were all tools, he recalled. They still are, and my goodness they were. And Detroit at the turn of the century we're talking about eighteen nineties. In the time that Ford went there and started to work there, there were one hundred thousand plus citizens. Ten railroad lines fed the city, and there were all kinds of manufacturing shops and concerns. And of course, Ford, while this is living large, being amongst all of those people, making all of those machines. And it's interesting the first ten years of his marriage, ten separate rentals, working on his car for months. And as he put it, of course there was no demand for the automobile. There never is for a new product. And he was cutting new ground. Henry Ford. When we come back more of the story of the man who invented the Modern Age here on our American stories, and we continue with our American stories, and Richard Snow, the author of I Invented the Modern Age, The Rise of Henry Ford, Let's pick up where we last left off, and I think.

Richard Snow (00:18:21):
It's worth remembering how courageous it was to stake everything on building automobiles in those days. Years later, Ford said a very interesting thing about it. He said, of course, there was no demand for an automobile. There never is for a new product. Matt Run's totally countered to the old saw about invention being the in the necessity being the mother of invention, and this very often it's exactly the other way around. Invention being the mother of necessity is you know, nobody wanted an iPhone until they.

Richard Snow (00:18:58):
Had one in their hand.

Richard Snow (00:19:00):
Anyway, Ford got his start company started, and seems instantly to have lost interest in it. I just wandered away, wouldn't show up.

Richard Snow (00:19:08):
Nobody knows why.

Richard Snow (00:19:09):
Perhaps he wasn't quite ready to manufacture cars. More likely he resented working for anybody. He never liked having a boss, and shed something that He then went on to ruin a second company, and he was still able for a third throw of the dice to find a circle smaller but a real circle of investors for his next enterprise, which he found in nineteen three with twenty eight thousand dollars capital paid in. This one bore his own name, the Ford Motor Company, and it would last now. His investors not unreasonably wanted the Ford Motor Company to build expensive cars. In nineteen seven, the Packard Gray Wolf sports car, though that term wouldn't exist for another forty years, cost ten thousand dollars, and a nice suburban house might go for eighteen hundred dollars. Now, work that calculation out today, and if prices have stayed relative, the house would cost maybe one point two million, and a Dodge Viper would cost six million dollars. So of course it was more desirable to sell something worth thousands of dollars than something worth hundreds of dollars, Ford leaved exactly the opposite.

Richard Snow (00:20:24):
Make the car cheaper.

Richard Snow (00:20:25):
You'll do better selling lots of low priced cars to farmers and shop clerks than you will a few costly ones to billionaires. And the way to achieve this, he said, and told one of the backers of his new company, is make one automobile like another automobile, just as one pin is like another pin when it comes from a pin factory, or a match like another match when it comes from a match factory.

Richard Snow (00:20:50):
But how to do it? How to do it?

Richard Snow (00:20:52):
The car should be simple and durable, useful to farmers. Ford might have hated farming, but he loved the farm life, or rather the virtue of loyalty and steadiness that the order that he saw in it. The car would be fundamental enough for any farm boy to understand and repair, rugged enough to negotiated the truly dreadful roads at the time, versatile enough to be hooked up to a band, a fresher, or a pump. Now by nineteen four he was a success, but he saw hidden inside every car he built, the ghost of a much greater car. And in nineteen eight he called together as most trusted executives and started designing one in a sealed off room in his factory. And here his genius played as strongly and steadily as it ever would, and his inherent contradictions deployed themselves only to a creative end. A contradictions because the car he was building would be at once as perfectly simple as he could make it and yet immensely sophisticated. It would, for instance, have four cylinders, when no inexpensive car had more than two, and the engines in multi cylinder cars tended just to be fussy, complicated, hard to repair, hard to maintain. Ford wanted his engine machined out of a single block of metal, and while his helpers were trying to figure out how to do this, Ford had another thought, slice off the top. That is, have the engine in a single casting with its four cylinders wholly accessible, and then fit the cylinder head on top of it like a hat and bolt that down. And that's how car engines are built to this day. The steering wheel and American cars and all cars was almost always on the right ancient tradition on that because the steam locomotive engineers sat head end right hand. In his cabin, Ford thought it belonged on the left, put it there, and there it stays, unless you're English. The materials in the body would be cheapest he could make them, but the chassis would be made of vanadium steel, which was a light, tough, very expensive alloy, quite new to the United States. And he'd run through the alphabet from his first Model A and now is currently selling the Model S. So we named the new car the Model T and put it on the market in October of nineteen eight. Very briefly, in eighteen seventy nine, a Rochester patent attorney named George Selden looked at a gasoline engine and thought, hey, this could make a wagon go, and drafted a patent said that it would be attached to the wheels of the car, though he didn't say how that would happen, and then he sent it into the patent office. But in those days you could put off a patent for seventeen years by making tiny modifications to your wording and stuff. And he kept it alive basically until the automobile was becoming a feasible thing, and then incredibly he got a patent on the idea of the automobile, and he got money backing him and started to exact ransom from all the car makers, even young General motors finally rolled over, and only Ford foughtum fought on, fought them alone. Patent litigation was extremely expensive. Ford was spending two dollars a car on the but he stuck it out right till the end, and he won, and that and that there he got.

Richard Snow (00:24:17):
You know, he actually got.

Richard Snow (00:24:18):
Headlines that read things like God Bless Henry Ford. Now the bottle t is no longer any sort of force in our lives, But I think it refuses to look placid or quainter to acquire that gloss of appeal that the that time puts on so many ugly things that high on lovely frame and pugnacious snout still flaunt the boxy antiques power to change a world. The car was tall because the ruts were deep, thanks in part to the vanadium steel. It was both tough and light, only eleven hundred pounds, and it could scramble over marshy terrain that would mobilize heavier cars for what became so ubiquitous an American fixed her. It had many eccentricities. Beginning moved forward, called a planetary transmission collector friend of mine who owns a model. He told me once that you could leave it parked anywhere. Nobody would ever steal it because nobody could figure out how to drive it. Three pedals sprouted from the floor. One on the right was to break the one in the middle put the car in the reverse. The one on the left made it go forward, and low gear went pressed to the floor, and then high gear when released. The driving gears were all engaged by bands that these pedals either tightened or loosened. But with all those petals on the floor, no one was an accelerator. That was a lever on the steering wheel, which you thumbed downward to feed more gas to the engine. And when you wanted to know how much more gas you had to feed, you left to feed. You stopped, climbed out, lifted off the front seat cushion, unscrewed the gas cap beneath it, and poked in the tank with a wooden stick marked like a ruler, but with gallons.

Richard Snow (00:25:59):
Instead of inches.

Richard Snow (00:26:01):
But for all the fussing the car required, it went, it went, and it was as dependable as a cast iron stove.

Lee Habeeb (00:26:11):
And you're listening to Richard Snow, who's the author of I Invented the Modern Age, The Rise of Henry Ford. Go and buy this book. You won't put it down. And the importance of Ford's courage can't be underestimated. No one understood the man. That's true, he probably didn't understand himself, but few would describe Ford as anything but courageous. And he had the courage of his convictions, no doubt. As to entrepreneurs throughout history, the Right Brothers we learned from David McCullough had that same kind of courage, and not that manufacturing excellence. By the way, mass marketing and mass manufacturing airplanes was not in the wheelhouse of the Wright brothers. And by the way, he did what nobody was thinking about back in those early days of automobiles. Generally everyone was just trying to make expensive cars, and here's Ford trying to make them affordable. And though the Model T had many eccentricities, it worked and it was as dependable as a cast iron stove. When we come back more of the remarkable story of Henry Ford. Here on our American stories. And we continue with our American stories and the story of Henry Ford. Let's pick up where we last left off with Author Richard.

Richard Snow (00:27:46):
Snow Ford liked to tell everybody a joke. He told it the President Wilson when he met him about the farmer making out a will instructing his lawyer to have him buried in his Modelty and the lawyer no reason for this, The man said, because I ain't been a hole yet that it couldn't get me out of.

Richard Snow (00:28:06):
And when it.

Richard Snow (00:28:07):
Was time to stay put and do some farm work, you could take off a rear wheel and hook it up to a thresher sawmill. The owner was expected to know how to do that, and indeed to maintain the car generally. Midwestern man named Alfred Stevenson, who owned the succession of Model Ts in the twenties, wrote about this. He said, the whole car was simple, accessible. In the evening, you could tighten the bands, look at the timer, clean the plugs. A weekend would do nicely to reline the bands, or grind the valves and clean the carbon, or maybe tighten the rods. A four day vacation was plenty to overhaul the engine or the rear end. If any of these jobs was a bit beyond your experience, you had merely to ask your neighbor, who not only knew, but would come over and help. The rapifications of this were far reaching and frequently unexpected.

Richard Snow (00:28:57):
In the Second World War.

Richard Snow (00:28:58):
For example, Germans were often superior to their American counterparts, but that advantage was canceled by how quickly a disabled sherman could get itself prepared and back into action, and the Germans were baffled and dismayed. Defined that, among his many other accomplishments, Henry Ford had created a whole generation of mechanics.

Richard Snow (00:29:23):
But perhaps the Model.

Richard Snow (00:29:24):
T's most profound impact, what made it the single most significant automobile ever built, was social. In nineteen eighteen, a Georgia farm wife for Henry Ford, your car lifted us out of the mud.

Richard Snow (00:29:39):
It brought joy into our lives.

Richard Snow (00:29:43):
The Model T broke the age old isolation of the farm in less than a decade, and wherever it went it spun out behind it a new civilization of highways and roadside fixtures like motels and of course, gas stations, and a new way of thinking about and time. And in the nineteen thirties John Steinbeck looked back with a sort of sardonic awe on what had done in just half of his lifetime. Now, of course, the Model T could never have had such an effect had it not been deployed in enormous numbers, and this, even more than the car itself, is the measure of Ford's genius. A number of car companies were turning out one hundred cars a day during the Model t's early years, and that demonstrates very impressive capacities of manufacture. But there is a fundamental difference between quantity production and mass production, and it was by inventing the latter that Ford invented the modern age. The Model T was a success. Ford could sell as many as he could make. The way to make them, he believed, lay in precision and speed. Precision meant part so scrupulously manufactured that one would always fit where it belonged, without any time consuming shaping or filing, a speed lay and breaking down the manufacturing process into every smaller segments. This began in the spring of nineteen thirteen with the magneto, which generated the electricity to fire the plugs. It took a worker twenty minutes to assemble one. When one worker put it together put another together. Ford separated the process into twenty nine steps, and rather than one worker doing twenty nine things, twenty nine workers would do one thing as the parts moved past their stations on what was the first modern assembly line. Before it had taken twenty minutes. Now it took thirteen minutes. So with the engine, then the transmission, then the upholstery, the axles, and the radiators, finally the whole car itself all was Ford said, bring the work to the man, not the man to the work. When Ford first unveiled his Model TY, it took twelve and a half hours to make one. A little more and a decade later, it took exactly a minute before the Model T was done. A car was coming off the line every ten seconds. Ford made his millionth Model T in nineteen fifteen, his two millionth in nineteen seventeen, and so on for a while, a million cars a year, and then in the early twenties two million. And he always lowered the price. He flew directly in the face of all principles of monopoly capitalism, which of course hold that if you have a desirable item that you alone own and other people want, you raised the price. Not Ford, he said, every time I shave a dollar off the price, I gain a thousand new customers. So the car had begun at eight hundred and fifty dollars and ended two decades later at two hundred ninety five dollars. In nineteen nine, the company made a profit of the two hundred and twenty dollars and eleven cents on each car. With the moving assembly line up and running, the profit fell to ninety nine thirty four, and that was fine with Ford. And then in nineteen fourteen he announced that he was raising the base pay in his shop to five dollars a day. This was twice the going rate for industrial work, and it caused a sensation. He understood that it would be big news. Think he would I don't think he quite prepared for the astonishing response that got. People came in from all over the country, and in fact he finally had to discourage him by saying he would only hire people who had lived in or around Detroit for two years or more. Ford's workers became his customers. No man who bolted together a packard gray Wolf could ever own one. Every Ford worker who wanted to could own a Ford. So Ford also created a modern cycle of consumerism in which we still live during the Great Black diaspora after the First World War up north to Detroit. The African Americans knew there were two shops, only two shops that were worth of applying to. Packard might give you a job, and Ford probably would give you a job. And he actually had blacks running gangs of whites with the power to fire them, which I think was not I can't think of another American industry in nineteen twenty four where that would have where that would have applied at all.

Richard Snow (00:34:19):
And in the end he had to give it up.

Richard Snow (00:34:21):
The last Model T came off the line, probably six or seven years later than it should have. In nineteen twenty seven, Ford had made fifteen and a half million of them, and when production ceased there were more than eleven millions still on the road. And of course there was tremendous interest in what Ford would do to follow the Model T. In fact, next to Lindbergh's flight, it was the biggest story of nineteen twenty seven. Car sales dropped everywhere in a boom time as people waited to see what was coming. It took the factory, of course, several months toy tool and when the new car, Ford had started over fresh by calling it the mo was announced that December. The New York World said the excitement could hardly have been greater had Powaw, the sacred white Elephant of Burma elected to sit for seven days on the flagpole of the Woolworth Building. It sold well eight hundred thousand in his first year, but Chevrolet sold a million that same year, and the Ford Motor Company would never again be making one out of every two cars on the American road in any event. That was Henry Ford. How really to assess the true impact of this man, It may still be too early. We're certainly still immersed in the modern world he created. I think Will Rogers, many years, many years ago, came pretty close when he said to Henry Ford, with none of his usual folksiness, it may take one hundred years to tell whether you hurt us more than you helped us.

Richard Snow (00:36:03):
But you certainly didn't leave us where you found us.

Lee Habeeb (00:36:13):
And a terrific job on the storytelling, editing and production by our own Greg Hengler. And a special thanks to Richard Snow What a storyteller and what a story to tell. He's the author of I Invented the Modern Age. The Rise of Henry Ford. And there's so much to unpack here, my goodness. The story is about World War Two, that we'd always heard that Americans could just get under the hood of anything and fix it. Well, this happened because of Henry Ford. He turned America into a nation of auto mechanics and tinkerers. I mean, to this day, that's why there are autozones. And my goodness, the story of what he did, bringing precision and speed to the manufacturing process, the first modern assembly line and bringing the work to the man, and of course bringing the speed with which he could produce one of his cars from twelve hours to one minute. Ten years later and millions and millions rolled off the assembly line, all totaled fifteen and a half million Model tees. And the thing I think most important contribution of Henry Ford's as it relates to capitalism and monopoly is that he did that thing no one expected someone with such market dominance to do, which should generally be rip off the American public and raise prices forward, always working to lower the price. And at the same time he raised the wages of ordinary workers and factory workers, doubling their wages and turning his workers into customers. That Will Rogers line was the best of all. It may take one hundred years to tell whether you helped us or hurt us. You sure didn't leave us where you found us. The story of Henry Ford, the story of the Modern Age, and the man who invented it. Here on our American Stories.